The biggest impediment to being successful may be something you find surprising.  No matter what field you’re in, or what you consider success to be, achievement of any kind comes, to some extent, through learning. Those at the top of their game have learned what they need to know to do it well. Whether they learned formally or informally, through life experience or in a classroom, they have learned, and they have put what they learned into practice. But success does not last. The successful person today can be a failure tomorrow, or at least not as successful. To remain at the top of your game, your knowledge must retain its relevance to changing circumstances—and everything changes. If we don’t change with it, we will fade into irrelevance. Take fiction writing for instance: The modern approach to fiction writing is, to some extent, a response to the excitement level of the novels’ big competitors—movies, TV, video games and social media. It’s harder to hold readers … [Read more...]